Austin was talked about, sometimes by Don Garber, prior to the official expansion process but they were not on the list of 12 cities being considered for expansion announced last December. Those 12 cities: Sacramento St. Louis Tampa/St. Petersburg Nashville San Antonio Raleigh Cincinnati Charlotte Indianapolis Phoenix San Diego Detroit
I don't know if that is sarcasm or not but that is a myth. The league does not own any percentage of the teams. MLS is made up of Investor/Operators. They own the league. Investing in the league give you the right to Operate a team. The teams created to take advantage of that right are owned completely by the Investor/Operator. For example, here in Houston the Investor/Operator is a group led by Gabriel Brener. That group has a company called Dynamo Soccer, LLC that owns the Houston Dynamo, Houston Dash womens' team, and the lease on BBVA Compass Stadium among other things. Dynamo Soccer, LLC is wholly owned by Gabriel Brener and his partners. MLS, as a company, does not own any part of the team.
With the TAM increase, why not just increase the salary cap instead? Would that not be far simpler? Or is there a reason to prefer a TAM increase over a simple base-salary cap increase?
Essentially, TAM encourages teams to improve the talent level of their regularly used players. Raising the salary cap would encourage the bottom end players of a team to earn more money, essentially leading to a lower ROI. Kind of a "Why pay the players we have more than they are currently accepting instead of paying to bring in the type of players we want." Also, TAM is, I believe, outside of the current agreement with the players union. Increasing the salary cap will give the players union more leverage to ask for even more, while TAM is discretionary on a year by year basis and cannot be leveraged quite the same way in the next round of negotiations.
Also, this TAM increase is "discretionary," meaning that these funds come from the teams themselves, rather than from the league. It's more like an expansion of the DP mechanism than an increase in the salary cap.
But how it is handled does say a lot about that league. And the voices are not flattering in this case.
Thanks. So partly "political" with the union and partly as a round about way of making sure it is spent on increased talent rather than inflation of the bottom end. Although I'd kind of expect a salary cap increase to result in replacing bottom end guys with better guys as opposed to paying bottom end guys more. MLS isn't the NHL/NBA/MLB where the guys are the roster now are the best in the world. Thanks. This part I'm not sure I like as much. Even though I'm a TFC fan, and so would expect my club to benefit from decreased parity, I like that MLS has come down in favour of parity rather than super clubs. This seems a step away from that.
I think you're wrong. It was true at one time when guys like Wade Barrett went to Europe for money. The days of players of that caliber leaving for money are over.
Umm. Not sure about that. The money is still, on average, better in Europe. Top level North American players? Some are getting big contracts--like Dempsey and Bradley--so that's a fair point. But not all of them.. And sure, a lot of any move to Europe is guys wanting to test themselves vs the best. But I'd not be ruling out money as a key reason--yet.
Very true, also, there is the fact that although there is a world worth of talented players, there is a limit to American players currently. MLS has that market mostly cornered, and with foreign player limits on teams, American players values go up as more teams are created. It is American's that are nearly all of the low end salary guys and there isn't other higher caliber replacements for them right now to justify paying more out overall for that same talent. Long term the American pool will grow and improve through the use of academies and more opportunities to play first division soccer in the United States, but that talent growth isn't currently as fast as the league is growing teams overall.
Just to get folks on the same page as to what we've seen in Columbus, the team awards were announce the other day. In a post on the Crew's web page. Time was that it was a special night to which fans were invited and the players dressed up. Not any more. It's just a post on a webpage. Used to be a time when the team had lots of volunteer staff. There was an organization called Crew Ambassadors as well as the Crew Chiefs. The former did things like passing out programs (which also have gotten smaller and cheaper--but to be fair so have those for the Blue Jackets) and helping organize events, supporter lineups before games, etc. Crew Chiefs (I was one--full disclosure) originally were modeled on the Red Coats org in the KC Chiefs organization--to sell and expand season tickets by getting fans to sell to fans. There were prized and the big one was the "Black Jacket" if you hit certain lifetime stats. I have one. Eventually that went away, partly as the ticket staff saw us as competition. It was blended into the Crew Soccer Foundation, which Mrs. KG and I worked on for years. That black jacket came with was was supposed to have been a lifetime stadium pass (and it was for many years) until the league decided they were giving out too many credentials (or so we were told)--and which also spelled the end of the Crew Ambassador's program. They decided to go with the "Action Team"--a bunch of intern types. Mrs KG and I stuck it out with the CSF for a few years--but when two directors, in turn, got better jobs/moved, we never got a call to come back and help with the latest one (who I have no idea who that might be). That was during the Precourt era. Now we were disappointed but realized that everything has a season. But the point is that Precourt essentially cut all of the volunteer staff, often without notice and definitely without any thanks for years of service. Volunteering was one place where the fans and team built a connection--and I'll give one example. I'm really a nobody. But when I went down to see FC Cincy play a couple years ago while my wife was at a conference in Cincy, I heard my name called. It was Mark McCullers. Or as I was recently reminded of while looking at Sirk's page, at the victory celebration at the airport in 2008 I was given charge of MLS Cup for about 20 min as the PR director needed someone he knew to keep an eye on it. There are many other such tales--many of us have one--like my wife's co-worker who had Brian Maisonneuve at his son's wedding. To sum up, one thing we saw was a drying up of volunteer opportunities with the team and this came when Precourt took over. I'd be interested if other teams have has similar experiences. This might well be, to be fair, due to the NFLing of MLS and not a specific owner..
Will owners really want to move their teams or will they just sell to someone else who is willing to invest and market the team in the existing city? After all, aside from the Crew, most of the other clubs that are struggling at the gate are not in small cities (Dallas, Houston, Denver, DC, Chicago, and Philly). Those are all major markets. I can't see giving up on those places easily, especially when several have fairly new soccer-specific stadiums and hundreds of millions of dollars in future bond payments they'd never be able to honor if they moved. Good luck selling a $150 million SSS in a city that no longer has a MLS team. The Crew are a truly unique situation because their stadium is dirt cheap. It was built for just $28.5 million and they probably don't have much debt left because they've already been paying it down for the last 20 years. Plus, whatever they still owe could be a bargain for anyone wanting to start-up a USL team in that market. So, there's no massive sunken, unrecoverable expense tying them to the area.
That's a red herring, for the reasons newtex states. But even if it weren't, it still wouldn't say anything enlightening about the league. A league wants to make money and gives its owners wide latitude to do so? This isn't news to anyone who's been following sports since the Dodgers left Brooklyn.
This whole script was written before... look how well it worked out for Houston and San Jose. Put the damn expansion in Austin and let them suffer like everyone else.
Did you see Don angrily raise his finger in the interview? "In 22 years we have relocated ONE team." (paraphrasing, sorry.) I'm thinking "That's right, Donny - and it's still pretty fresh!" That was just an awesome move, wasn't it?
Look up Single Entity. https://www.brotherlygame.com/2016/2/3/10819230/mls-single-entity-and-the-issue-of-trust
As he contemplates raping a second set of fans. The age-old one rape defense: "I'm entitled to a second."
I read the article. I see nothing in there that says the league owns any percentage of the individual teams. If that was your point. Is this the paragraph that is supposed to enlighten us? "First of all, what is single-entity? Single-entity is a term used to define the ownership structure of Major League Soccer. It essentially means that all owners own shares of one company, Major League Soccer. There are no shares of each franchise. Owners run franchises that are simply a part of the whole." I'll admit I don't know what "There are no shares of each franchise" means. There are certainly shares of ownership of some of the teams. Dynamo Soccer, LLC , for example, has multiple owners that each have a "share" of ownership of that team.
I'm not sure that's really getting at the issue. He seems to be confusing single entity, which is a legal structure, with the various rules about spending. You can have single entity with free-spending rules, or multiple entities with a salary cap, so its worthwhile to maintain those distinctions. Actually, I'm not really sure what he's getting at. Lots of rhetorical questions but he doesn't seem to be making a case for a specific course of action. Perhaps then we could evaluate if single entity prevents that from happening.
And honestly, most of us who followed the league through it's formative years probably saw this coming. We knew that when MLS 'arrived' we'd have a more stable league, more teams, richer owners, better stadia, better broadcasts, better players, and an overall 'higher quality' fan experience. We also realized we'd get higher ticket prices, more fanbois, a greater disparity between haves and have-nots as the richer owners flexed their muscle, and a generally more corporate experience, including teams moving due to 'underperformance'/shenanigans. I bet I'm not the only one who's going to look back in 20 years as the mid-oughts thru the mid-teens as being the most interesting, entertaining, and exciting years to have been a fan of the league.
Wade Barrett was of the era when solid but unspectacular American MLS starters would play out their contract where they were topping out in the $35-40K range and then go to Denmark or Sweden because they could get more money. Solid but unspectacular American MLS starters now get paid enough that such a move rarely happens anymore.
There's a potentially interesting subplot here IMO. I realize Joe Roth essentially said there wasn't much the other owners could do to block the move of the Crew to Austin, but I am curious what that is, exactly. Here is the link to Roth's remarks for those who want to watch the business meeting where he discussed them: https://www.reddit.com/r/MLS/comments/7br330/joe_roths_words_regarding_the_crew/ Now, a bit of history. In 1982, Raiders owner Al Davis successfully sued the NFL on the grounds that the NFL constitution, which then required 3/4 of the owners vote to approve any move, violated the Sherman Act: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...3b0-951c-71867635987a/?utm_term=.bc7dc61f3ae2 The parties later settled for a lesser amount -- the NFL still reportedly paid the Raiders about $20 million -- but the ruling, to my knowledge, is still law: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-05/local/me-394_1_antitrust-suit So, it's understandable that sports leagues are now reluctant to stop an owner from moving his team to another city, least they get sued and end up writing a big check with a lot of zeros just as the NFL did to Al Davis. Except MLS isn't a typical sports league, because as a single entity the league owns 100% of each and every team -- the owners only have the right to operate a league owned team under a management agreement. I appreciate it's complicated, but the analogy I've made in the past is this: you can lease a restaurant from me, which gives you the right to make money from the operation. You may be able to transfer that right to operate the restaurant to someone who will pay you for it, but that doesn't give you the right to sell or move the building -- it's not yours to sell or move. An MLS team is no different. The league, which is to say every shareholder, owns that team, PSV only has the right to operate it. It's an unusual structure, but it is intended to insulate the league from antitrust claims -- a single entity can't "conspire" to violate the antitrust laws, as it takes two to tango. We've discussed many times how the single entity structure shields the league from claims brought by the players, an issue which played out in the Fraser decision, but you would think that the league's single entity structure also should insulate MLS from an owner asserting a Sherman Act violation of the kind Al Davis successfully sued the NFL for after the league tried to block him from moving the Raiders. So I'm curious why MLS owners claim to be so powerless to prevent the move of the Columbus Crew. The league owns the team, and the league acts through its owners, so why can't they stop it? I can only guess that either the league isn't anxious to test the single entity structure in court against a fellow owner, or the owners do in fact agree with the move.
Are moves ever handled well? What team was moved where the fans in the old city were like "You know that wasn't so bad, nice group of guys I wish em the best of luck in their new city."